Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!

today, this morning, i have filled up my coffee, drank it, and boy it is delicious! It blazingly wake me up like an alert deer. I went outside to the backyard. I am totally shocked from what i saw. I am seeing cats and dogs falling from the sky. Trees are uprooted themselves and leave. birds are suing the inventor of airplane company left and right for using their patent without compensation of royalty fee?!

First they came for BitTorrent,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pirate.

Then they came for my privacy,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an outlaw.

Then they came for YouTube,
and the freaking cabinet went mental.

Yup

And when the ISP's come up with a way of charging for it indirectly the politicians - like many who frequent this lair - will have nothing to say about it.

It seems that if you're up front about your charges you're evil but if you hide them behind all sorts of propaganda and trickery you're all shiny and good. Is it any wonder governments themselves resort to indirect taxes?

The network belongs to the telco, so why are they not allowed to have their network in their own way? I don't see how this is different to me putting up a squid proxy in a corporate network to keep users from accessing youtube.
It is the consumers choice to use a telco (and we have so many choices in the Netherlands). If our government wants to dictate the information infrastructure then they ought to own it.

Well apparently he thinks he can start his own ISP just like opening a corner coffee shop. The funny thing, the ones that he is defending will fight tooth and nail to make sure that their monopolies/oligopolies stay in place.
Since actual competition has a negative effect on profits and we all know that profit is king in capitalism...

Here in the US, we recently had a case where William Cronon, a historian from the University of Wisconsin, ran an op-ed piece in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html) in response to the labor unrest in his home state (the governor of Wisconsin and Republicans in the state were pushing to virtually ban teachers in the state from unionizing as part of a "budget balancing" maneuver). He didn't take sides, but rather argued that Gov. Walker's position went against deeply-rooted Wisconsin traditions--shared by Republicans and Democrats alike--of political transparency and cooperation.

What was the response? The Wisconsin Republican Party filed a freedom of information request to access all the e-mails sent from and received by Cronon's university e-mail account. How is this possible? Because Cronon, who works for a public university, is a civil servant of the state, and therefore his e-mail is technically public property.

Regardless of how one interprets Cronon's original piece, it's obvious how such an abuse of power made big waves in the news here. Not only was someone's private correspondence forcibly made public through a legal loophole, but Cronon is a tenured faculty member. The whole point of being a professor with tenure is to be able to make independent statements even if society might not want to hear them. Plus, the move was carried out by a major political party, which has deep implications. One can see how the freedom of information request is tantamount to a political attack on an intellectual and freedom of speech.

None of this is to say that the request is "illegal". My point is that--and apparently this is a worldwide phenomenon--people are so "legally-bound" in their thinking that they can't imagine that laws and the principles behind them change or that we should change them. Yes, the network is the telco's, so I guess one should be able to do what one wants with one's private property, or in the case of Cronon, any citizen from Wisconsin should in principle be able to access (according to one interpretation) the e-mails of a public employee. But do we want to live in that world? If yes, enjoy your status quo. If no, gain power and pressure your politicians into doing The Right Thing. Or, once in a blue moon, you might just be able to get by with the politicians doing it by themselves.

In a way, this does happen with different dialling codes, premium / free phone numbers and so forth.

However I've never really agreed with a lot of phone tariffs either.

Look it in another way: They will change you extra $0.10 for every time they transfer the word pizza over the wire.
But there is a better analogy - water. You are charged for water by the volume you consume(presumably), but the water utility would like to charge you 50% more for water that you use for making food and 50% less for water for the washing machine. Same water, just different applications.

Look it in another way: They will change you extra $0.10 for every time they transfer the word pizza over the wire.
But there is a better analogy - water. You are charged for water by the volume you consume(presumably), but the water utility would like to charge you 50% more for water that you use for making food and 50% less for water for the washing machine. Same water, just different applications.

I got the analogy first time round. I'm just saying that many services do offer different rates depending on usage even though the consumption is the same.

In fact, going back to your example, many water boards will have different rates for different customers (eg office, home, industrial).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's right nor do I agree with charging different rates for different internet services. In fact I fully hope this kind of practice gets crushed before it becomes common.

You pay for using their network to access the internet. They want to charge for free of cheaper services provided by others, that happen to compete with their overpriced products in their broken business-model, that only exists because all cellphone providers do the same thing? I mean: â‚¬0.10+ for a 160 character text-message which is not even guaranteed to arrive?

Why wouldn't the politicians oppose this? Think about it, they don't want to give up any more of their ill-gotten (or not as the case may be) cash to watch Youtube or use IM any more than you would, especially if they weren't promised a kickback from said charges.